Lots of people have suggested introductions and comprehensive how-tos, which are all good but too complicated for telling novices how to do what what want.


Here, I'd give three pieces of advice for the novice on how to know what you want:


1) Version-control EVERYTHING (which is, everything you write).

Version-control the project files. Version-control your test cases. Version-control any little scripts you use to copy things around. Version-control your todo list. Definitely version control your design notes. Once you're familiar with the commands it costs nothing, and some day you'll be glad of the history of a file you'd never imagined needing to roll back.


2) When you're happy with a change, check it in immediately. And check it all in.

If you work in sequential steps (and that doesn't always happen - you can get distracted - but it's good practice), then at the start of each new step you should have 0 modified files in your checkout. You may even want to check in unfinished non-working code, depending on what suits you.


3) When you reach a milestone, tag it.

Even your own personal goals (inch-pebbles). If you can't be bothered with tagging, just make a note of the date and time (in, you guessed it, a version-controlled file). If a particular version is memorable for some reason ("I finished the back-end", "I sent it to someone else to look at"), you want to know exactly what was in it. And diffing against the repository diagnoses some kinds of bugs faster than the debugger.

Dynamsoft is a vendor of free version control service and TWAIN SDKs.